Trade Union Website League Table 2016

It’s been 12 months since I last updated the Trade Union website league table, and so I’ve complied the latest metrics below (previous results can be seen for 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012).

The league table uses established industry metrics to measure how many links (and the importance of these links) each of the TUC-affiliated unions receives from other websites and social media platforms. It does not attempt to measure the quality of the actual union website itself.

Websites that score highly are much more likely to appear higher in Search Engine Results. Search engines are the biggest source of traffic to websites, and so the higher the union, the more influence they should have online.

Websites that score highly are much more likely to appear higher in Search Engine Results.

I’ve revamped the benchmarks this year. I’ve taken out Moz Page Rank, as it provides too much emphasis on links to the home page at the cost of deep links. I’ve also taken out Google Page Rank, following Google’s announcement that they won’t be updating their historic public rank indicator any more.

To replace these, I’ve added Ahref.com’s Domain Rank. This is a similar metric to Moz’s Domain Authority. I’ve been using Ahref.com recently, and have been impressed with how many statistics they provide.

For the second year in a row, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy top the table. An impressive performance for an organisation with 54,000 members. UNISON and Unite remain in second and third position, while Equity move up to fourth and the BDA slip down one place to fifth. The NUT, Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists, GMB, NUJ and Musicians’ Union make up the rest of the top ten.

Biggest risers

The biggest upward movement this year belongs to The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, who jump an impressive 13 places to 16th. They suffered the biggest fall last year, but have bounced back. The teaching unions have performed well this year, with the NAHT moving up 9 places to 15th.

The NASUWT also moved up significantly, and the NUT score an impressive 6th. The teaching unions have been in the news a lot in the last 12 months, and this extra coverage is likely to be a big factor behind the increase in rank.

Biggest falls

The largest falls go to the British and Irish Orthoptic Society and the FBU, moving down 11 and 10 positions respectively. The FBU jumped up significantly in last year’s table, with press coverage of their industrial action against the widespread cuts to the service. The slip back this year is likely to be due to lower amount of coverage the union has had in the news.

The UCAC have slipped to the bottom of the table. This was caused by their move to the new .cymru domain extension. The website forwarding looks to have been set up correctly though, so their metrics will bounce back soon.

Conclusions

Despite the change in the metrics I’ve used this year, it’s interesting to see how similar the results are to last year. Many of the unions that have moved sharply have done so following a reverse move in last year’s table.

The biggest surprise is that the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy have managed to hold onto the top spot. Previously, only UNISON or Unite had topped the table, and UNISON miss out on the top spot by a very small margin.

I now have five years of data to play with, so I might do a trend analysis at some point to illustrate the long term movements of each union, if it’s something people would like to see.